26-D

Dyslexia

B. UNDERSTANDING THE AREA OF SPECIAL NEEDS/DISABILITY*

1. The nature of area of special needs/ disability

• General definition (if any)
  • Dyslexia is a neurologically based specific learning difficulty that is characterised by difficulties in one or more of reading, spelling and writing. More research is becoming available regarding dyslexia in speakers of Chinese too.
• Range of conditions (if any)
  • Accompanying weaknesses may be identified in areas of language acquisition, phonological processing, working memory, and sequencing.
  • Difficulty learning the alphabet (b,d; p,q...)
  • Difficulty with associating sounds with the letters that represent them (sound-symbol correspondence)
  • Difficulty identifying or generating rhyming words, or counting syllables in words (phonological awareness)
  • Difficulty segmenting words into individual sounds, or blending sounds to make words (phonemic awareness)
  • Difficulty with word retrieval or naming problems
  • Difficulty learning to decode words
  • Difficulty distinguishing between similar sounds in words; mixing up sounds in multi syllable words (auditory discrimination) (for example, "aminal" for animal, "bisghetti" for spaghetti)
• Characteristics
  • Slow or inaccurate reading
  • Very poor spelling
  • poor handwriting
  • Difficulty associating individual words with their correct meanings
  • Children with dyslexia may fail to see (and occasionally to hear) similarities and differences in letters and words, may not recognize the spacing that organizes letters into separate words, and may be unable to sound out the pronunciation of an unfamiliar word.
  • warped words, letters morph together etc: http://www.dyslexia.com/image/misc/text221w.gif

2. Causes of disability (if any)

Neuroimaging

Modern neuroimaging techniques such as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) have produced clear evidence of structural differences in the brains of children with reading difficulties. It has been found that people with dyslexia have a deficit in parts of the left hemisphere of the brain involved in reading, which includes the inferior frontal gyrus, inferior parietal lobule, and middle and ventral temporal cortex. (Cao F, Bitan T, Chou TL, Burman DD, Booth JR (October 2006). "Deficient orthographic and phonological representations in children with dyslexia revealed by brain activation patterns". Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, and Allied Disciplines 47 (10): 1041–50. doi:10.1111/j.1469-7610.2006.01684.x. ISSN 0021-9630. PMID 17073983.)

Genetic studies

Several candidate genes have been identified, including at the two regions first related to dyslexia: DCDC2^[6] and KIAA0319,^[7] on chromosome 6^[8] and DYX1C1 on chromosome 15.

6)Heng H, Smith SD, Hager K, et al. (November 2005). "DCDC2 is associated with reading disability and modulates neuronal development in the brain". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 102 (47): 17053–8. doi:10.1073/pnas.0508591102. PMID 16278297.

7)Paracchini S, Steer CD, Buckingham LL, et al. (December 2008). "Association of the KIAA0319 dyslexia susceptibility gene with reading skills in the general population". The American Journal of Psychiatry 165 (12): 1576–84. doi:10.1176/appi.ajp.2008.07121872. PMID 18829873.

8)Grigorenko EL, Wood FB, Meyer MS, Pauls DL (February 2000). "Chromosome 6p influences on different dyslexia-related cognitive processes: further confirmation". American Journal of Human Genetics 66 (2): 715–23. doi:10.1086/302755. PMID 10677331.

3. The general impact of the special need or disability on a student in terms of development and learning

• Slow in copying notes and in writing/ completing written tasks
• Difficulty pronouncing long words, has trouble in logical sequencing of sentences, hence might be very quiet and withdrawn. Does not speak up much in class because of teasing from friends or to save oneself from embarrassment
• Low motivation/self-esteem, academic frustration and impaired attention (might occur together with ADHD)

The short- and long-term consequences (in terms of development and learning) for dyslexic students and what we (teachers) can do to help.